In this age of technological advancements, mobile computing devices, including mobile phones (e.g., smart phones) and tablet computers with/without touch screen displays, are being increasingly used for accessing web-based content. Owing to a large chunk of content consumption on these mobile computing devices, most of the content creators want the web-based content to be appropriately published on these mobile computing devices.
Most of the web-based content created for big screen devices like laptops and desktops are generally not suitable for viewing on the mobile computing devices. For example, websites increasingly using feed formats such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or Atom that provides users with frequently updated web content. Each of the web syndication formats follows a general structure comprising multiple items, where each of the items further comprises, for example, a link, a title, meta-data such as HyperText Markup Language (HTML), a brief description, etc. Generally, the HTML in the RSS feeds is not suitable for viewing on mobile devices such as, mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), tablets, etc.
In addition, most of the mobile computing devices have different configurations and capabilities. For example, the mobile computing devices have variations in display screens, processing power, memory, network speeds, keyboard functionality, etc. In order to be able to display the web content across different mobile computing devices with different capabilities and configurations, the web content is transformed for each type of mobile computing device.
Conventional methods for transforming a web page comprising the web content include applying transformations at individual page levels, dropping elements and modifying the web page based on pre-defined rules. However, this approach results in rewriting applications for various browsers, markup languages and device types, storing large code bases and acquiring design expertise at least for popular mobile computing devices. Hence, there is a need for storing the web content in a way that allows the mobile device output to be varied for each request.
Further, most of these mobile computing devices have an elongated rectangular display screen for displaying web content. The display screen of the mobile device can be oriented in more than one way with respect to a user viewing the content. In such mobile devices, when a user attempts to rotate the mobile computing device, the content on the display screen is usually reoriented so as to correspond with the viewpoint of the user. For example, the display screen may be oriented in a vertically-oriented position (portrait orientation) or a horizontally-oriented position. In the portrait orientation, the display screen accommodates more content than in the landscape orientation. Therefore, while presenting the content on the display screen, particularly the audiovisual content, the content has to automatically be formatted and restructured when the mobile computing device is reoriented from a landscape orientation to a portrait orientation or vice versa.
Conventional methods for restructuring audiovisual content of the web pages on a mobile device include momentarily pausing streaming of the audiovisual content and removing the audiovisual content represented in a tree structure, for example, Document Object Model (DOM) on detecting a change in orientation of the mobile device and re-rendering the audiovisual content after restructuring the web page based on attributes of the new orientation. However, this method does not allow an uninterrupted play of the audiovisual content as the streaming is stopped momentarily. Further, repeated streaming of the audiovisual content in different orientations of the mobile device leads to increased consumption of internet bandwidth.
In light of the above stated discussion, there is a need for a method and system which overcomes the above stated drawbacks in efficient management of display of web-based content on mobile computing devices.